Slashdot Mirror
Google Tells Users To Drop IE6
Kelly writes "Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome. Google recently removed Firefox from the Google Pack bundle, replaced it with Chrome, then added a direct download link for Chrome on Google and YouTube. Google's decision to list IE6 as an unsupported Gmail browser does not affect just consumers: Tens of thousands of small- and mid-sized businesses that run Google Apps hosted services may dump IE6 as well. What's especially interesting is the fact that Mozilla is picking up two out of three browser users that Microsoft surrenders."
I shall soon follow suite with a little browser sniffing on future sites I design! I can finally stop supporting that shitty browser after all!
At my previous job (fairly large company) they've standardized on Win2k on the clients. In fact they're still running it. Guess what browser is included? The client is heavily modified so rolling out a new one isn't an easy task.
From what I've heard they're little above 1 year in planning to switch to Vista, but since there are quite a lot of migration issues I don't see that coming soon. I'd say it's atleast 6 months away, probably more. The company uses some very specific programs written by people that might not be with the company anymore, and all those need to work for business to continue as usual.
So they will continue to surf the interweb with IE6 for quite a while. Other browsers can be installed but that is unsupported and might result in a call from the security department on why you use unauthorized software on your machine. You probably don't want that. And none of the internal applications work with anything but IE6 (IE7 is being tested with the vista change) anyway.
Large organizations are fun.
But you shouldn't read gmail from work anyway so that's not a big problem. As long as most other sites still work. Or perhaps they should use an "external browser" and one "internal" one. Hehe.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
As long as there are no addons like adblock possible i'll be sticking to firefox...
Precisely what about IE6 work the way it's supposed to? The plethora of rendering issues aside, it is by far one of the most unstable pieces of software I've ever used. And unless you dig very deep into the Windows processes and force it to run in its own process, it crashes your desktop when it goes down.
XP/Vista, fine. I prefer Office 2007's interface by far, but I've never had any memorable issues with any version of office, going back to at least the Win3.11 days (and for what I do, the functionality there is just fine 99% of the time). But IE6 is broken on so many levels that it's just not funny.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
It would be nice to compile wine under win2k and thus make available some apps like Chrome.
Iterate is human, recurse is divine :p
Amen. Thanks to Firefox, web "developers" who code for IE only now do so at their peril and I also remember the bad old days when this was not the case.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Google is becoming a company that we should all be worried about, but they are playing a predictable games. MS grew because it offered the cheapest product on the block that more or less worked. Google is doing the same thing. The problem is that MS is now that inefficient behemoth with a business model that assumes a cut of every PC sales and aftermarket revenue. This is an environment where all Google needs to survive is a fraction of penny from every hit.
Google now offers cheaper products than Microsoft, read free to the user, and few people seem to worry about the opportunity costs in terms of privacy and all that. This is in the same way that no one worry about the issue with MS in terms of being assumed a pirate rather than a paying customer.
Beyond all this, why would any sane person with a competing product want to have anything to do with MS. MS could come up with an update to IE tomorrow that would break google apps. We all know that MS has the motive, and the will to break other peoples software is well documented. This justifies asking people to move away from IE because the day that MS does break Google is the day that google will lose a lot of good will. People will blame Google and not MS.
Not supporting IE is a gutsy move. It shows that Google is willing to play hardball. It shows that google is no longer the feel good get along with everyone company, but a company that is willing to dominate and create monopolies. Good for those that want a competitor to MS. Bad for those of us that want a quality product delivered by a company that treats the end user as a customer, not just a proxy to earn third party money.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Not being able to create a website that degrades gracefully is the weakest form of web development.
You are one of those people.
>IE7 has an Adblock Plus equivalent?
A lot of people just install a hosts file that has many ad servers pointing to 127.0.0.1. This is a cross platform solution.
Yeah...as soon as I saw the headline I heard every web developer in the world say "yessssssss"
My bank's page works in IE7, FF and Opera; but I cannot log in if using Chrome.
And Windows 2000 was just a rebadge of NT with a shiny desktop...
Yeah, as a user of NT since the 3.51 days, I can say that there was more than just a rebadge and polish from NT4 to 2K(NT5) and 2K to XP(NT5.1).
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Well, it may be news to you indeed, but IE7 has a full-fledged open extensibility system, which does of course mean that there is a number of ad blockers available.
On the whole, with IE7 add-ins, it's quite possible to get IE to roughly the same level as FF or Opera, including all the nicer stuff such as saving/restoring tabs, inline search, and so on. The only thing that can't be changed is the crappy renderer, but that's a headache for the web designers, not for end users (and it seems that IE8 will fix that as well).
All that said, I'm still sticking to Opera for speedy surfing, and I do not intend to change that anytime soon.
Any time I find a site that only works properly with IE, I send them an email (if I can find contact info) pointing them to Viewable with any browser. There's never been a good reason not to make sites that don't work equally well no matter what browser you use, and, quite frankly, I'm tired of hearing about "but I've got to do it this way for IE." If you must do something special for IE, do it after you have it working in a Real Browser, not instead.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Leopard (or any OS X) is really different from Windows in sense of programming. Even Firefox people which uses multi OS frameworks are forced to ship FF 3 as 10.4+. Opera uses a totally different concept starting with Trolltech Qt framework so they are happily shipping to 10.3.+ but if you notice, they had to drop pre 10.3.x support.
That is the thing which pushes Apple ahead of everyone but same time creating problems in enterprise/business World. Of course nothing says a goodly written application without any massive deep level hacks won't run in the future. E.g. if you just change the new mail sound of it (which is a bit hack), even Eudora will work under Leopard.
What? Microsoft always adds new libraries! But at least they backport them, not like Apple (eg: Win32s from Windows 3.1, Unicode libraries for Win 9x, Win2K SP4 included some features from XP, WPF for Windows XP, etc)
OK I scanned all the comments, but I dont see it mentioned anywhere. I use IE6 at work, and I have Gmail, and I saw this message 2 weeks ago. It DID have a link to IE7. Unless they changed it later, the summary is very misleading, and several comments are heading in the wrong direction.